According to Gartner Inc. Worldwide, business intelligence market revenues are expected to grow 8.7%, reaching $12.7 billion in 2012. Business intelligence tools deployment in organizations will grow fivefold in the same year. Nearly all organizations involved in the marketing, IT, design consultants, and engineering domains are focusing on implementing business intelligence solutions within their framework to increase their productivity and reduce cost of operations. Another industry quickly recognizing the need for these tools is the health care industry.

Application of Clinical and Business Intelligence to the Health care Domain

As the health care industry takes a giant leap in terms of growth, health care data will become increasingly difficult to manage. Health care organizations are facing critical issues (management, reimbursements, business decision making, patient care analysis, financial analysis, etc.) that not only hamper their ROI but also the quality of service provided to patients.

Health care organizations can use the technologies and best practices that help in analysis, collection, and integration of business and patient care information by using clinical and business intelligence tools. This helps improve the quality of service offered while lowering the overhead costs a significant extent. According to Gartner Analysts, organizations that used intelligence tools outperformed their peers by 30% in terms of productivity in 2011. Clinical and business intelligence tools combine the power of data warehousing, reporting, analytics, and performance management to devise a result-oriented, easy to work with solution.

Using clinical and business intelligence tools, the data (billing, medical devices, patient care, patient reimbursements, labs, claims, employee, etc.) from a health care organization is extracted and brought to a centralized repository, allowing easier analysis and tracking of operational and business figures. The biggest advantage is that anyone from a novice to a widely experienced professional can use these tools with a little training. These tools not only help in business management and analysis but also in increasing the clinical performance standards.

How Will it Impact Healthcare Organizations?

Clinical and business intelligence tools have a user-friendly web interface, which permits the streamlining of volumes of data and analysing such data through multiple sources (such as dashboards, reports, figures, etc). Data intelligence from these tools helps in extracting information to deliver quality care and also in implementing better business models. These are some of the benefits of using clinical and business intelligence tools:

• Improved patient care: These tools help in better analysis of patient data by collaborating information from patient reports, medical devices and treatment history, and delivering a single platform for information sharing for doctors and analysts. Not only does this increase the quality of patient care, it also helps in predictive analysis of future chronic disorders.
• Better Business Decisions: Clinical and business intelligence tools help in analyzing costs and revenues, cash flow statements, and return on investments to identify underutilized resources and services. This data helps in the comparison of costs versus margins, and helps the organization to make better business decisions.
• Performance management: They help in efficient monitoring of resources to improve the performance of employees and assigning responsibilities effectively. Web based reports help in tracking every employee’s productivity and performance, which can be used to adapt better policies and terms that aid in a better operational infrastructure.
• Clinical data analysis: These tools help in management of claims information that help health care organizations to improve the response time to claims and nullify fraudulent claim attempts. It assists health care organizations analyze risk and detect anomalies in claims information, which help in controlling the expenditures and increasing the profits for health care organizations.

The demand for quality information and the implementation of best practices will continue to grow in the coming times. Taking technological solutions that aid in better management, gathering, and analysis of data using clinical and business intelligence tools will not only improve the quality of health care industry but will also improve the financial balance of every health care organization.

EHRScope

EHR Scope is a leader in EHR consulting and education. They offer a variety of valuable resources to help physicians and practices navigate their way through the EMR implementation process. EHR Scope includes a network of resources for EHR comparison, multimedia industry news and information vital to operating within current Healthcare legislation and guidelines for ARRA stimulus HITECH act. Check out www.ehrscope.com and www.ehrtv.com for more information.